Yesterday President Obama announced yet another major change to ObamaCare, allowing insurance companies to reinstate policies that ObamaCare itself forced them to cancel. This adds to a fast-growing list of ObamaCare “fixes” that were unilaterally decreed by the Obama administration, including the delay of the employer mandate and a slew of short-term exemptions to various ObamaCare rules that were awarded to select companies and unions.
Consider the current situation: millions of people who were told they could keep their healthcare plans have had those plans cancelled; millions more are unable to sign up for new plans on the malfunctioning website of the ObamaCare exchanges even though they will soon be fined if they don’t somehow get a plan; those who do manage to access the exchanges are realizing they must get coverage for unnecessary services such as maternity care for men; and businesses have downgraded workers from full-time to part-time status in order to avoid ObamaCare mandates.
My friends, this is no way to run a government. The president cannot purport to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, throw people off their healthcare plans, drown businesses in a sea of impossible regulations, and then assume the authority to enforce, not enforce, or change the law at will. This does grievous harm to individual Americans, to the healthcare system, and to our tradition of governance based on the rule of law. We live in a constitutional republic, not an autocracy where the law is whatever the monarch says it is.
The Obama administration’s mania for controlling the healthcare sector has created a crisis so profound that even convinced ObamaCare supporters in the president’s own party are speaking out. But the damage cannot be repaired by more administrative fixes. Democrats can still protect ObamaCare in Congress, but their willingness to do so is weakening with every new ObamaCare disaster. We must continue to chip away at this overreaching, ill-conceived law until it is repealed entirely and replaced with free-market reforms that work. For reform ideas that some colleagues and I have proposed, see here.
Separately,
I appeared on Fox News’ Special Report yesterday to discuss the investigation
into the attack on Benghazi. You can watch the video here.
